Excel has network effects. If N people are using excel, the incremental N+1'th user is forced to use it or risk not being able to open documents from the N users. Excel is also sticky, in the sense that a user used to Excel UI is hesitant to switch to a new UI. Tokens dont have network effects. If N people use fable, the N+1'th user could use any other model, and have no impact.

Remember mythos ? I was half-expecting them to scare us with a new danger: How AI can covert code into other languages, and confuse the hell out of all of us.

The model is fantastic. And costs almost nothing. The only problem I see is that they will train on your data.

There are zero-data-retention providers of DeepSeek models, of which I have used openrouter (with zdr guardrails), and fireworks. But these are 3x to 5x more expensive than directly using DeepSeek, possibly due to poor caching. Thats the price to pay for zdr.

What appeared initially to be a huge innovation was later easily duplicated by many. There are no platform-lockins or network effects. Switching costs for users are zero, and there are low barriers to entry, with vast numbers of models to choose from and more appearing every day. As a business a token will be a commodity like an electron. Doesnt matter who produces it, or how (solar, wind, coal, nuclear etc) as long as it powers my toaster.

When you own stock at a broker in a margin account, you may sign an agreement to allow the broker to lend out your stock to someone else. For lending your stock, you are entitled to a stock-borrow fee which usually is quite small say 0.25%, and paid by the borrower (short-seller). The borrower then sells the stock to someone else. At a later point, the short seller closes their position by buying it back, and returning it to you. This is roughly the mechanics of it. So, to answer your question, the short seller makes money from folks who buy high and sell low. In this specific example, the stock-borrow fee say was 5% because, the float is still low, and if the short seller borrowed at $165 after the IPO and sold it, and then bought it back at $135 and closed their position, they made money from folks who bought at $165 and sold at $135.

Can you point to data that suggests rate of token revenue growth is slowing ? This announcement, and the price cuts from openai are hints in the direction of pressure from open weights models but not conclusive.

By definition, creativity cannot be automated, and AI is a fantastic automation machine. It can explore thinking paths at a rate humans cannot match. But creativity is bringing the unthinkable into the thinkable, and that requires sensory experience [1]. Specifically, new definitions and symbols which never existed before. Imagine the concept vector space, and expanding that with new independent dimensions. Is that even possible ? When you look at history the answer is yes !. And each time there was an independent dimension added, it was an act of genius. It is an instructive exercise to name these moments in history where an independent dimension was added to human thought. Some examples in math would be the invention of a number, and in politics could be the idea of democracy. By contrast, LLMs are trapped in the vector space they are trained on, and they lack the feedback loop with sensory experience to be able to create and validate theories.

[1] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28024/1/Scientific_Inventio...

If there is any data to support this, please share.

same, pi as a harness works best, better than claude code and open code.

Nailed it ! There are some folks who behave holier-than-thou just because they happen to use some language. Language missionaries if you will, and they are insufferable.

They are drunk on their own kool-aid. To the rest of us it is very annoying, and makes me want to say: it is just a freaking weights machine, stop.

There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.

In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.

agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1].

[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...

Koan to the author: What was never lost can never be found.